About: Brad Templeton was founder and publisher at ClariNet Communications Corp., the #1 internet-based electronic newspaper publisher, until selling it to Newsedge Corporation. in 1997. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days—including being one of the first to set up an international link—and in 1987 he founded and edited a special edited USENET conference devoted to comedy. This newsgroup, named “rec.humor.funny” became the most widely read computerized conference in the world, demonstrating the popularity and marketability of edited information.

Templeton was the first employee of Personal Software/Visicorp, which was the first major microcomputer applications software company. He is also the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products, including VisiPlot for the IBM-PC, the compressor in Stuffit—the world’s most widely used Macintosh application, various games, popular tools and utilities for Commodore computers, special Pascal and Basic programming environments (ALICE) designed for education, an add-in spreadsheet compiler (3-2-1 Blastoff) for Lotus 1-2-3 (picked by PC World as one of the top software products of 1987) and various network related software tools. 

He is chairman of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime writer on cyberspace issues. The EFF, founded in 1990 is devoted to civil rights online, in particular free speech and encryption rights.